8 ms·
Introducing Scrivener 3
- abtinf 9y agoAnyone used scrivener and found it a useful tool for general note taking, a personal wiki, or getting things done? From the website, it looks like many of their features would be useful as a general work support tool, despite the emphasis on writing.
- synicalx 9y agoPersonally, I use it for writing essays/research pieces and as part of that I take A LOT of notes, gather up sources and references. Scrivener is pretty brilliant for all of that IMO. Note taking, probably not as good as Onenote or at least not as flexible. But it lets you keep notes in the same "place" as your work (assuming your work involves writing, of course) which for me personally is hugely beneficial. For a wiki, I actually think it would work quite well. It gives you a lot of tools to sort and store information, and it plays nicely with storage like Dropbox. Only catch is, you need the software in order to be able to read/edit your wiki.
- pfooti 9y agoyeah, I actually use it as a role-playing campaign manager. Each campaign gets a scrivener book, and the various tools for tagging and organizing cards and resources scrivener has are perfect for this use case.
- satysin 9y agoI use it for daily journaling, writing articles, etc. As well as for writing terrible short stories :) It is quite a versatile bit of writing software. Stable and I've never lost any data. Lots of features (perhaps too many sometimes) and it is well designed imho. I've only used the Windows version though and from what I've seen the macOS version is a slightly different product (please correct me if I'm wrong).
- hliyan 9y agoI actually tried using Scrivener for writing half a novel, then realized that one plain text file per chapter with a plain text editor with a good display settings is all I need.
- kendallpark 9y agoDuring college I wrote many essays and half a novella in Scrivener. It fit my style of writing, which is horribly non-linear. My novella required a lot of world-building and I appreciated Scrivener's dedicated section for notes and images relating to each story. I think my best use of Scrivener was to take notes on taxonomy in biology class, making good use of nested documents. By the end of that class I had a huge chunk of the tree of life filled out. I think something like workflowy would be more apt at this task right now, but it was fantastic at the time. That said, workflowy has terrible support for images.
- innocentoldguy 9y agoI highly recommend Scrivener for any project that has words. It is a great project management tool for taking and organizing notes, research projects, wiki writing, blog writing, journals, college papers, novels, GTD lists, etc. Personally, I think the most useful features cork board, the research folder, tags, and the formatter, but there are many other tools in Scrivener that make managing projects easy, regardless of size. Scrivener also supports plugins, so 3rd-party companies can make templates and other tools for it. For example, if you like Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method of writing, you can get a Scrivener template that uses the Snowflake Method to help structure/outline your writing. Finally, Literature & Latte is a great company to work with. They are responsive to questions and issues, and seem to really care about their customers.
- zhubert 9y agoGood work on the new release. As a long time Scrivener 2 user, I'm happy to see this. However, I wanted a simpler and subjectively nicer looking tool for distraction-free writing and thus made my own. It's free, has a few social features built-in, tracks writing progress/goals/distractions, and can make good looking books. Also, adding features to Singular Writer has been really easy, as evidenced by it being in existence for a few months. For the Windows crowd, we've had feature parity from day one. Check it out if you want to write more [with friends]. http://www.singularwriterapp.com/ http://www.singularwriterapp.com/
- rainbowmverse 9y agoSome details about the person behind it and maybe some links (on the page) would be great. These days I'm wary of downloading anything I can't get a wide range of opinions on by searching, and all I get are irrelevant results.
- zhubert 9y agoThat's an excellent point! In focusing on the features and such, I forgot to write up an About page, I'll do that. For those reading here, I'm the guy that wrote a blog post on how to self-publish a book in 2017 that was on the front page here for a day or so back in February (www.zhubert.com). After that, I realized how ludicrous it was that publishing had to entail so much complexity, so I started thinking about what I wanted while writing my second book, then took a break and wrote the app instead. The binaries are code signed for their respective platforms, and the links off the main page demonstrate the features by category (Writing, Publishing, Social). There are some nice pictures, some animated gifs, and a Twitter account over at https://twitter.com/singularapp https://twitter.com/singularapp.
- JoshMnem 9y agoLinux users might be interested in this Emacs/Vim alternative: https://vimvalley.com/replacing-scrivener-with-emacs-and-vim/ https://vimvalley.com/replacing-scrivener-with-emacs-and-vim...
- claudiojulio 9y agoAndroid please.
- selud 9y agoI only used Scrivener for my master thesis a few years ago but keep recommending it to everyone who is about to write a longer text. It's a great tool and helped me a lot to overcome writing procrastination. Very happy to see it's actively developed.
- grandalf 9y agoI'm curious what features you found/find most helpful.
- jkestner 9y agoI also used it just for my thesis. Most helpful feature was being able to jot thoughts down into cards that could then be moved around and organized until coherent chapters coalesced. If you do the same in a plain outlining tool, you may find yourself distracted by the order it pre-imposes.
- selud 9y agoThe nested cards are definitely a great tool to create the structure. Even after the initial outline, I came back to them every now and then to re-evaluate the logic flow or to place new sub-topics that came up. The biggest win for me was how Scrivener supports an iterative workflow. I started with keywords on the cards for what a chapter should be about, wrote a few sentences describing the keywords inside the document, added context so the sentences became paragraphs, fleshed it out and polished it. During this process I used colour labels in the outline view[1] to keep track of the state of a chapter. All this took away the pressure to write a long, good and coherent text. I only had to increment little by little to which my brain had far less resistance. If I was stuck on a chapter or couldn't motivate myself to keep working on it, I switched to another one and do a little work here, a little work there. Also the usual Latex applied as well: I only focussed on the content and didn't format anything properly and left placeholders for images. I used Pages (the old version with two sided layout) for the final assembly where I only had to worry about layout and not on the content. [1]: http://www.techtoolsforwriters.com/using-labels-in-scrivener/ http://www.techtoolsforwriters.com/using-labels-in-scrivener...
- walterbell 9y agoCan the iOS version import/export files for Windows/Mac without going through cloud storage like Dropbox?
- f_allwein 9y agoNo - as far as I understand, this only works though iCloud. Works well in my experience though.
- walterbell 9y agoEven with iOS11 support for file management? That's unfortunate. Some documents are not allowed to be hosted in cloud storage.
- pseingatl 9y agoYes. I believe you can connect the file to a Mac; I don't remember if I pulled the file off that way or emailed it to myself.
- tjic 9y agoI've been using emacs for about 27 years, and even wrote two novels ( e.g. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005JPPMS6 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005JPPMS6 ) in it. Author friends tell me that I've really really REALLY got to try Scrivener, but I know from previous attempts at using other tools that nothing but emacs feels right to me. I should give it a try, I suppose...but it's going to be really weird.
- stuntkite 9y agoIt's an amazing tool. I've been using it for screenwriting and worldbuilding for years. It's just a really clever take on a writing tool. I'm sure your Emacs kit fits your needs, but I'd bet even trying Scrivener, you might get some ideas to enhance your Emacs flow.
- tjic 9y agoI fear that trying Scrivener might launch me into a five year quest to duplicate some of its features in elisp! :)
- AdeptusAquinas 9y agoI will be glad to see the 64 bit version on Windows. The current version seems quite sluggish compared to say, Word 2016. I've used it for 80k sized manuscripts and it starts to chug mid way through. Also some better support for things like Git would be nice. It works currently, but is a bit of a hassle. Integrated commit/push etc would be awesome (like VS Code's model) Other than that, great tool. I like being able to keep all my planning in the same place as the draft, and being able to switch between a synopsis for the scene and my actual writing.
- crooked-v 9y agoI'm sad they still don't have any real support for plain text or Markdown editing.
- innocentoldguy 9y agoScrivener isn't a word processor or editor as much as it is a project management tool for writing. The point is that you just focus on your writing as you use the tool and then compile it to whatever format you want, including plain text and MultiMarkdown. While Scrivener does support some level of formatting in the editor, that's mostly for convenience as you work with it, as far as I can tell. The final format of the output of the project occurs when you compile it. I hope that helps.
- crooked-v 9y agoEven having the possibility of all the crap that goes along with copy-pasting and broken formatting is a negative for me, not to mention the wasted hotkeys.
- nsriv 9y agoFor those interested in a Windows Beta, check here: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=40621 https://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=57&...
- oaeide 9y agoMaybe change this part of the website: "We don’t have an ETA yet, other than that Scrivener 3 for Windows will be available some time in 2018."
- lstamour 9y agoThe version for Windows will appear next year. The codebase isn’t shared as far as I know. They’ve announced if you buy Scrivener 1 for Windows today, you’ll get a free upgrade to Scrivener 3. (Check the blog post for details.)
- hitekker 9y agoIt's a terrible shame that Scrivener 3 drops support for El Capitan. I want to try but upgrading my entire OS would be quite a hassle.
- jamesgeck0 9y agoMight as well start thinking about upgrading anyway. If the past is an indicator, Apple will likely stop releasing security updates for El Capitan in a bit less than a year.
- ako 9y agoStill happily running an iMac 24" from 2008 (harddrive replaced with an SSd). Apple considers this hardware too old for macOs Sierra. Probably will need to upgrade it to Windows 10 to keep it up to date.
- ken 9y agoWith my user hat on, I agree. My main workstation is still going strong with 10.11 (the latest it officially supports), and there's no end-user features of >10.11 that I want (maybe APFS). Or even of newer hardware. With my developer hat on, I completely understand where they're coming from. Sierra adds a ton of useful new functionality, and fixes a ton of bugs. (There's several new features in 10.11 which just seem completely broken for any non-trivial use, and which were fixed in 10.12.) Not needing to support 10.11 makes life a lot easier. If I weren't using 10.11 myself, I'd make my application 10.12-only in a heartbeat.
- avtar 9y agoDoes anyone know who created their video? https://vimeo.com/235737232 https://vimeo.com/235737232
- mattlondon 9y agoIntroducing...V3 of what, exactly? Hmm - am I blind, or does that page have zero explanation of what Scrivener 3 actually is? RSS Reader? Ebook reader? The list of improvements could apply to just so many random things. I am sure it is great and all, and that there is more details elsewhere on the site, but you lost me after a scroll or two trying to work out what this product is, and if it something that I might want to buy. Confused, tab closed, bye, sorry. </constructive-criticism>
- coldtea 9y ago>does that page have zero explanation of wha Scrivener 3 actually is The most famous word processor/editor for writers.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- oatmealsnap 9y agoThis is just an announcement for the new version. "Release notes". Click the product page or homepage for info on the product. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview
- egypturnash 9y agoYeah, that's definitely a page written for people who already know what Scrivener is and will have their ears perk up at the mention of the long-awaited V2. Scrivener is a word processor specialized for long-form writing. It lets you easily write a big piece of text in smaller chunks (chapters, paragraphs, whatever works for you), keep reference material handy, and compile it into the kinds of formats a professional writer is likely to need for passing their text on to the next stage in the publishing process. Broadly, you can think of it as "an IDE for people who write prose, not code".
- rayalez 9y agoFor screenwriting I highly recommend checking out emacs fountain mode [1] (plus imenu-list and Olivetti minor modes). In combination with org-mode it is the most powerful writing/outlining tool you can imagine. Also, if you haven't tried them, I highly recommend checking out WorkFlowy [2], Gingko [3], or Nulis [4] (disclaimer - nulis is my own project). Outlining and organizing projects as a tree structure is insanely powerful and convenient. The idea of organizing a script/novel as a tree structure rather than a flat outline allows you to "zoom into" as many levels as you want, and conveniently focus on any part of your work. I recommend using separate branches for worldbuilding, characters, notes, and plot outline, summarize the high level ideas quickly, and expand on them by adding more levels. Writing the actual draft though is much more convenient in emacs + fountain/markdown + org/imenu. To take it to a crazy level of awesomeness consider storing your files in git, or at least dropbox, to have a history of revisions. --- [1] https://github.com/rnkn/fountain-mode https://github.com/rnkn/fountain-mode [2] https://workflowy.com https://workflowy.com [3] https://gingkoapp.com https://gingkoapp.com [4] https://github.com/raymestalez/nulis https://github.com/raymestalez/nulis Also, emacs/fountain screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/AJpUNsz.png https://i.imgur.com/AJpUNsz.png Looks awesome, truly a pleasure to use.
- anigbrowl 9y agoI'd like to support a new project by a fellow HN user. What's your main difference (present or intended) from Gingko?
- rayalez 9y agoThanks! Nulis is open source, allows you to edit all the cards simultaneously(instead of double-click/esc to jump between editing modes), has writing stats(to develop daily writing habit), and allows you to save trees offline. I'm also working on a desktop version that will share the code with online version, so that will be convenient to use and develop.
- anigbrowl 9y agoI noticed the desktop version, and that it's cross-platform. That could be super-cool for security sensitive stuff/remote location work. I'm making a bunch of workflow changes these days so I'll try a small project in this to see how it goes. thanks very much for the suggestions and the work you've done on this already.
- ChicagoDave 9y agoSorry folks, but Fade In Pro is the best: https://www.fadeinpro.com/ https://www.fadeinpro.com/ Rian Johnson wrote The Last Jedi using Fade In Pro. Gary Whitta wrote Rogue One using Fade In Pro. (drops the mic)
- teilo 9y agoFade In Pro is for screenplays. Scrivener is for general writing with a focus on books. Different tools for different jobs.
- ChicagoDave 9y agoIt's still mentioned as screen play software, so there is overlap if that's what people are doing.
- KaoruAoiShiho 9y agoNot as many features, not in the same category.
- copperx 9y agoWhy the name dropping? It tells me nothing about the product except that it is suitable for writing screenplays.
- ChicagoDave 9y agoOkay in hindsight this was a trolling comment and I apologize. I honestly thought Scrivener was a screenplay editor, but even so, my comment was pretty much ass-hattery. Where's the delete button?
- pfooti 9y agoi love scrivener, but i'm not a novel-writer. i use it to run role-playing campaigns. it's is more-or-less perfect for that kind of work. I can add images and PDFs under the research / resources section (i tend to mine existing and published content for a bit here and there), I can tag different cards with PCs and NPCs that are present / relevant, it is really a great organizing tool for that.
- paultopia 9y agoScrivener is my emergency application: when I've written a total mess (and everything I ever write goes through that stage), I dump it into Scrivener, chop it to bits, and rebuild. This is an insta-upgrade.
- bennesvig 9y agoI couldn't have written two books without Scrivener. Now I use it for a Commonplace Book.
- technofiend 9y agoBefore anyone says wouldn't it be great if there was a Linux version, Literature and Latte had one for more than a year. They discontinued it after less than 10 licenses sold. Perhaps that was because of the separate code base for each platform which meant in the previous versions the UI and feature set varied. L & L claim the Windows and MacOS versions will have the same UI but the fact version 3.x wasn't released for both are once is enough to tell me the code bases have most likely not converged.
- tragic 9y agoThe windows version has worked fine with Wine up to now anyway, so hopefully that won't change in V3.
- pseingatl 9y agoAs far as I know, they never sold licenses for the Linux version. It was always in beta. In the forums, people offered to buy licenses--perhaps users of the Linux version bought a Mac or Windows license and told L&L, but I don't remember the Linux version ever being for sale.
- technofiend 9y agoYeah see my other reply: they asked for donations but never received more than half a dozen over two years. I misremembered their selling it for linux. It was free and donation appreciated but not required.
- shock 9y ago> They discontinued it after less than 10 licenses sold. How do you know that? Can you share a link? I don't think Scrivener for Linux was ever sold by Literature and Latte. Lee Powell from Literature and Latte stated in a 2011 comment⁰ in Linux Journal: "We don't have the resources at this time to tweak it into a polished, native-feeling Linux application, and so it will continue to run as free beta software for the foreseeable future, until such time as we are able to give it the extra attention required to move it towards an official, commercial release" The latest Linux version of Scrivener I can find is from October 2015 and is still a BETA – so from 2011—2015 Scrivener for Linux was always in beta and unsupported. The release announcement reads: Version 1.7.2.4 is identical to the current Linux 1.7.2.3 version, but with the beta expiry removed. Version 1.9.0.1 also has no expiry. Both versions remain unsupported. I am asking you again to state your sources, and in the absence of that I'm gonna assume you're talking out of your ass. ⓪ - https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/scrivener-now-linux#comment-368990 https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/scrivener-now-linux#com... ① - https://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=32709 https://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&...
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoLove Scrivener, will upgrade, some problems because I use it on Windows and OS X synced with OneDrive. Current workflow Scrivener -> markdown -> markdown-styles -> HTML -> DocRaptor -> PDF.
- bewe42 9y agoEven more amazing is a little tool called Scapple from the same author. I use it to brainstorm and collect thoughts. Absolutely love it and I read that they plan to update it as well. Can't wait.
- phodo 9y agoI was about to ask about this tool. Looks amazing. How have you found it to alternatives (e.g. onenote / evernote, mindmap tools, etc.)?
- bewe42 9y agoIt's not an alternative to a note-taking app. Scapple helps me to clear my thought process like no other tool. It works for me because it's so simple and limited. That's why I'm actually ambivalent about an upgrade and fear it might get too many new features and loses it's appeal, though as I understand the author he's fully aware of this. There are just a few things I miss